


never the same place you left it

by handschuhmaus



Category: The Lord of the Rings - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, Asexual Character, Historical-ish anyway, Mental Health Issues, Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-15
Updated: 2020-05-16
Packaged: 2021-03-02 17:34:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 783
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24210688
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/handschuhmaus/pseuds/handschuhmaus
Summary: Frodo finds it hard to be back home after the war. It helps to be with Sam, but there's the question of his family.
Relationships: Frodo Baggins/Rose Cotton/Sam Gamgee
Comments: 2
Kudos: 6





	never the same place you left it

Bag End is a bachelor's home. It was in Bilbo's time, and Frodo's few years hadn't altered that. It's cozy and neat and it should be a nice place to retire to, work on his philology. He's too young to retire, really, but the war aged him decades in the span of years.

The war is the problem, even though it's over. Why it wasn't this bad, when he was recuperating in England, that he can't say.

He can't sleep. He can't sit and read peaceably. The home that should have been a sanctuary (that had been for Bilbo, coming home long ago) isn't.

The house Sam has for Rosie, now—after a month of sleepless nights, he goes visiting. He misses Sam. 

And then it's all "would you like some more peas, Mr. Frodo?" and "you must stay the night, Mr. Frodo."

It's only a blessing he doesn't have to be in the same room as Sam, that knowing he's in the same house, that the chairs he can see from the matress they set on the floor (better comfort than many a night in the war) were made by Sam's hand, lets him sleep soundly. 

Frodo dozes until high noon, the first long rest he's had in what feels like aeons, and then the two Gamgee tots get tired of being kept away from the strange house guest and pounce. 

"I can't impose on you, Mrs. Gamgee," he says, when she's sliced the children some of the last of the apples and sent them to the kitchen table to eat. And then Sam comes in, flushed red from the sun, and dirty, and suddenly Frodo's heart is buoyant. But he has the grace to stay, trembling, still, instead of trying to interpose himself in Sam's marriage.

Something passes between Sam and Rosie, in a look, and Frodo never thought of Sam as someone with a will to conspire, but whatever was said without words, Rosie pats his hand and says "Stay as long as you need to, Mr. Frodo."

When Rosie takes the children out to play in the yard, Frodo gets up and crosses the room like a man dying of thirst to feel Sam's sturdy frame again. "I'm here, Mr. Frodo," says Sam, "I'm here," and they're holding each other, like drowning men. It isn't the so-called "love that daren't speak its name," and yet Frodo fears there is something about this display that would trouble the children. And Rosie—Rosie Cotton is an excellent woman who doesn't deserve to have her marriage disrupted by this strange madness that has taken over Frodo Baggins' life.

But they don't let him leave that night, and Frodo isn't sure he had the will to do so anyway.

* * *

He doesn't make it a week back at Bag End: the strange disquietude won't easily let him sleep and the deep slumber of the exhausted after 28 waking hours ends in sweaty tangled sheets and heart-pounding terror. 

It's a shame to impose upon the Gamgee household, but he's not sure he can survive this without Sam.

"No," Rosie contradicts him, "Sam would wither away if we let you die on us."

She sits in the rocking chair with a sock she's knitting (no one ever had the patience to tell Frodo how to do the heels...) and he is curled on the cot, wrapped in a quilt she and her mother made, a scrapbag wedding-ring pattern, feeling like an invalid. (Was this part of her hope chest? Has he taken this much (too much) of their marriage?)

"Sam would go to the ends of the earth for me," he tells her fervently but his voice is trembling and scarce. "And I would do anything within my power for his sake."

"Then rest yourself, and try to get well," Rosie says, and he shrinks from it. He doesn't know how to get well, he only knows he's back to being lost in a living horror even though he's back home, and the one rope in his storm-tossed sea, the one landmark his compass points to, is Samwise Gamgee.

"It'll take time," Rosie tells him flatly and perceptively. "I don't know how you'll heal, but you've got to give it a chance. Them as know say the brain is a complicated organ, and you know you'd be sat up weeks at least if you'd only broke your leg."

He lets out a breath he didn't know he'd been holding. "I know I'm imposing on you. If there's anything..."

"Mr. Frodo," says Rosie, and sounds an awful lot like her (...like their?) Sam, "you're our friend. And like you said, you'd do anything you could for Sam."


End file.
